Jewellennium
What we abandoned with no value are "trash"; what we consider valuable are "treasure"; but how can we define the boundary between the valuable and the valueless? Time and space; reality and the virtual; materiality and the digital; nature and artificiality; completeness and fragility; trash and treasure...Intersection takes place in between these opposites in such a post-millennium era. If we remake and redefine a jewelry in a digital society, what would be the value we endow it with?
Authors
LUK Yu Ching
CAO Xiaotai
GUO Rui
Description
Our project name “Jewellennium” is combined from Jewellery and Millennium, simply implying that we are to discuss the valuable things in craft in our digital, post-millennium society relating to the jewellery culture.
Starting from the debate on trash and treasure, the following values we have proposed and agreed to include:
- Combining different artistic techniques and materials means to understand the theories behind and each other
- We also concern the natural circulation and material cycle in the post-millennium that we always lack resources
- There is interdependence, coexistence in mancrafts and nature
- Additionally, local or traditional craftsmanship somehow become parts of our positionality.
As artists and a local group member, we bear the duty to revive it when it is vanishing in a digital society. And these are like a manifesto that we had talked about.
Three of our members are all currently located in East-asia and live with Chinese culture, so we chose a heritage in China called Porcelain-bodied Bambooware(瓷胎竹编), which is also a craft that require work distribution of craftsmen in different art practices. We imitated the materials by 3D printing, studied the bamboo weaving technique, and eventually presented them in the format of jewellery installations.
Process and workflow
Terence in Tokyo made the prototypes by glass and other recycled materials, while turning them into 3D data;
Gray in Shenzhen, where also the 3D printing factories are located, made the 3D modeling of resin body and delivered the outputs to Angela;
Angela in Hong Kong finally combined our items by bamboo weaving.
Ideas of digital porcelain come from varied cultural legacy. For example, the structure of the bowl cover is a modernized imitation from the classic model of Porcelain-bodied Bambooware. And the water-wave structure plate is an imagination beyond the water-wave ceramic from 1000 years ago; the ring structure imitates the stony environment that bamboo lives in, in a traditional Chinese painting style.
Then there are our prototypes from Tokyo. It’s super exciting that Terence had collected so many plastic recyclables, because of Japan’s policy on recycling that is fine enough to make these structures as prototypes for his glass-blowing items. He also provided 3D data, and we chose two different resin materials to print these digital imitations.
Angela’s practices has provided us with great inspiration. We took these natural flows as reference into our 3D modelings, we also learned more about bamboo as a material from her feedback. Her natural bamboo weaving brings our project closer to our topic— ecosystem friendly practices and handicrafts.
